VIRTUAL Manchester Livable Cities

Abstract

Urban planning education recognizes the need for pedagogical tools that move beyond technical design skills and help students understand the complex social, political, and environmental negotiations that shape real cities. However, many existing approaches—ranging from design studios to urban simulations—continue to assume rational decision-making and equal stakeholder participation, reinforcing an simplified view of urban development.As a result, students often enter practice without understanding why well-intentioned sustainable or equitable proposals fail, who gains or loses from urban redevelopment, or how power asymmetries and negotiation dynamics shape lived outcomes. There remains a pedagogical gap: a lack of accessible classroom tools that allow students to experience contested planning processes rather than merely study them. This paper addresses that gap through Playable Cities, a role-based simulation game made to immerse students in the competing priorities of planners, developers, residents, activists, policymakers, and tech innovators. By making trade-offs unavoidable and embedding structural power imbalances into gameplay, the simulation reframes urban decision-making as a process of conflict, compromise, and negotiation rather than technical optimisation.The paper reports findings from a mixed-methods study conducted with 30 design students in India, drawing on pre- and post-surveys, Arcweave-based decision logs across ten rounds of play, behavioural trajectory tracking, cluster analysis, and thematic analysis of student reflections. Findings demonstrate significant gains in systems thinking, recognition of power dynamics, and understanding of stakeholder conflict, while revealing limited shifts in emotional empathy. The study argues that intentionally unbalanced, conflict-driven simulations can better prepare students for real-world urban governance, advancing a shift from “designing the city” to “negotiating the city” in livable cities education.